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Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
Insights, Marketing & Data: Secrets of Success from Industry Leaders
VOXPOPME - Jamin Brazil, CRO. Discover the 4 key filters for a successful new business/ product extension. Why qual will outgrow quant; how to shape data so it sticks; the role of a CRO.
If you’ve ever worked with a survey, attended a focus group, watching a video interview with a customer - or possibly even thought that there must be a better way to teach your kids maths - then you’ve probably worked with some of the companies Jamin Brazil has set up.
Jamin was the co-founder and CEO of Decipher, the CEO of Confirmit, the founder and exec Chairman of HubUX, which was sold to VoxPopMe where Jamin is now the CRO. He's also an advisor/ board member for Parsec Education, Michigan State University and Adjunct Professor at California State University.
It was a pleasure to have such a wide-ranging conversation, getting into diverse topics such as:
- The importance of making things!
- The four key considerations for a new business venture/ product extension
- Taking vs creating market share
- The role of a Chief Revenue Officer
- VoxPopMe's mission
- How to shape data so it sticks
- Giving back to Central California
- Helping schools and changing how kids learn
All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/
Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com
The overrapping thesis for me is that I believe that qualitative research is going to grow much faster than quantitative research over the next 10 years, and the reason I believe that is at the end of the day, a survey is just trying to facilitate a conversation at scale, but nobody speaks in Likert scales, nobody speaks in picklists, and so the ability to be able to analyze a thousand people's points of view, have a conversation with a thousand people in a qualitative framework, is very, very intriguing, very powerful, because it allows you to really uncover the true connect with humans in a human way.
Speaker 1:Now, if you ever work with a survey, attended a focus group, watch a video interview with a customer or possibly even thought there must be a better way to teach your kids maths, then you've probably worked with some of the companies German Brazil has set up, managed and introduced to businesses across the world, including 75% of the fortune 500. German was the co founder and CEO of decipher, the CEO of confirm it, the founder and exact chairman of hub UX, which was sold to Fox Pop me, where German is now the chief revenue officer. He's also an academic, a philanthropist, a very good podcast host and a lovely guy to boot. To that end, if you keep listening, you'll also discover why bluey the cartoon is key to a happy life. I'd also like to take a moment to say thank you to Brighter for sponsoring this episode.
Speaker 1:Brighter is an international research and insights consultancy specializing in healthcare technology, telecommunications and gaming. You'll find out more at brighter dash, globalcom. That's brighter than why. So B R Y T E R, then globalcom. Now onto the interview. So, jim, first up, thanks so much for joining today.
Speaker 2:It's an honor to be part. I'll tell you something that I learned about 10 years ago when I started this journey of podcasting and speaking, and that is never been an opportunity, and so, for me, I'm very thankful and grateful for any opportunity to join a podcast or a conversation with another research professional. So thank you, henry.
Speaker 1:Well, thank you. That's very kind, firstly, to be described as a professional, which many people have been slightly dubious about, and also, you are actually truly the podcast master, but we'll probably get on to that. You joined the course of the interview. So, jim, one thing I just wanted to start off with. I asked most of the guests this question what's something about you that most people might find surprising, that they wouldn't find just as part of your standard online profile?
Speaker 2:COVID was an interesting point for me, going from traveling 80% of my time to not traveling at all. So they had a tremendous amount of free time for that air quotes and so I picked up a hobby woodworking and I make furniture, cabinetry, whatever started with cutting boards and in fact even for employee appreciation things that I do know I'll oftentimes make them some sort of like a cutting board or whatever in the form of a reward, and I just find it so satisfying actually building something with your hands.
Speaker 1:That is so cool. I love that idea of actually making something for employees as well. It actually shows you care. You've put the time into it.
Speaker 2:And I'll tell you this, connected to that I've oftentimes, because it's easy to write a check, and I'm not demeaning the importance of the money either. But if you play the long game with relationships, which you and I both do, you have to understand that in 10 years that person's probably not going to be connected to you that you're appreciating at that moment in time. However, if you give them something that's connected in some way whether it's an award, this is on a desk or framed or whatever they will always make that connection to that time in their life when they were appreciated and the value there is. You're giving them something that's actually got ongoing attribution of making them feel valued, and I think in today's economy that is absolutely priceless.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, definitely agree. It's a big subject in itself, isn't it? But yeah, I mean, I suppose, in comparison, because I still have some of those and I'm very grateful for those processes, but I have some of those corporate finance transaction like Tombstone type things. Yeah, yeah, Tombstone exactly.
Speaker 1:But they're sitting around in my office. But I know they give them to everybody and they're just mass manufactured somewhere, so it doesn't really mean quite as much as if someone had carved it themselves, which is probably asking a little bit too much for them to do that type of thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean point taken. This is a really interesting point that you're making and that is there's very little in today's world that anchors us to the past, and I'm thinking about our digital personas and the way that we've been reframed in the context of stories where you have or feeds, and everything is quite literally real time. So if you and I followed each other on Instagram and I'm not very active there, but if we did, presumably we would use like Instagram stories and I would see these snippets of you in that point in time in time and then those would go away, and then you would provide more information, snapchat, et cetera. And so having something that is actually tangible, whether it is the Tombstone that memorializes some PE transaction or whatever, or a cutting board that was made by your boss those things, I believe, are where management should be trying to overindex. And the reason why is again the at that attribution of hey, I remember when and it just continues to pull you back to that point in time we had it before with the in our generation.
Speaker 2:I don't not presuming I'm that year as old as I am, but I'm 53. And I grew up with a photo album that was. My mom would update it every year with a couple of pages of, like key photos from that year, and it would just sit out on her countertop growing up, and so it was always this like opportunity to be able to, you know, thumb through that at whatever, some random points during the month, and that's just. Those kinds of things just exist less than less in our society.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so interesting. You say that because I'm sticking exactly that when you were talking about the example of Instagram and you know it is very ephemeral not to do Instagram but just digital media as a whole. And I'm exactly the photo album thing and I assume wondering that might come back to that point, because I noticed in actually one of my kids rooms today who's 15, he's got our old school photos, you know, kind of amongst album covers and whatever, but you know they were like six or seven.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, interesting about having that tangible physical kind of point of connection. But, jamie, I probably shouldn't wrestle us back onto the story no, not at all Onto the topic that the podcast and your career and where the industry is going as a whole. So could you just talk me through a little bit through your career? You've had an amazing career. I mean, starting off with, you know decipher and then focus vision and their companies. I know quite well because I was a client of them. But what did they do? Why did you set them up? You know how did the proposition evolve?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, for me there's a rule when I started Decipher with Jamie Plunkett, neither of us were smart enough even though he did graduate from Stanford to kind of frame things out as we do today. But really there's four key questions, and that is is there pain? And so, thinking about Decipher, which is a premier professional grade survey platform for those that don't know, and then later Focus Vision, which was the leader, leading and market dominant video streaming service for focus groups and IDIs both of those businesses there was pain. So with Decipher this is pre-adoption of online surveys we were doing pencil and paper intercepts and phone-based intercepts, very clunky, very time-consuming, very expensive. There's a lot of pain there. And then the question after that really becomes is does the consumer know there's pain? And again, in both cases there definitely was pain. So if you're a researcher at Procter Gamble, you might not be able to travel to all the different global focus groups, in which case with Focus Vision you could just sit down at the comfort of your computer and watch those in real time. And then, is the customer willing to pay to have the pain removed or are they willing to buy?
Speaker 2:The solution Is the third question. The fourth question is are they willing to buy it from you? And that fourth question is really, really, really important and one that I had not really ever over-indexed on. I just asserted that if you can answer the first three, then obviously the fourth is true, and with my most recent startup that I had Hub UX that sold to Blocks-Potty. That was a big learning for me because I realized, even despite the fact that I had lots of relationships in a solid brand, walking into COVID, basically with corporate budgets and changing etc. Etc there's a lot less appetite for new tech in the space, and so it created a lot more challenges for the business, even though I was checking off the first three.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really fascinating. I hadn't thought about it quite like that. I probably should have done. The first part is the classic VC type of thing, isn't it? Is there a market problem? Is there a market opportunity? But then the next two and three. So what would two and three again?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, so are they. Is there pain? And then do they know there's pain? This is a really important part that oftentimes is skipped, especially in the VC framework, because it's so obvious. From an outsider it's like, of course you'd want this problem to go away, but the reality is that the market's like no.
Speaker 1:It's fine.
Speaker 2:I don't have the visibility that this is an issue at the moment, in which case, now, you're on an educational path, and so a good example of this right now is generative AI. So, with the launch of chat GPT in November of 2022, with open AI, there's this brand new fancy tool and it does a bunch of stuff and it actually makes people's can, has the opportunity to improve our lives. But as researchers, I mean more specifically and so. But the problem is that, like does the consumer, in this case, the market researcher? Does the market researcher actually recognize that doing something like creating a discussion guide is painful? Like, like is there, you didn't mean it. So now, all of a sudden, you might have to go on this process of this campaign on hey, old school discussion guides suck, don't do it that way. Start with chat GPT, as you see what I mean. So there's like an educational component, which is not where you ever want to be if you're starting a business, because there's too much time and money spent in that phase of education.
Speaker 1:Yes, thanks, jim, and it's really interesting, and I would definitely like to go back to your points on AI in a moment. So, summarizing, I'm getting right. Number one is there a problem? Number two do your potential customers know that there's pain? Three are they willing to pay? And then four are they willing to actually pay for it or buy it from you? So does that interrelate, or how does it fit in? In terms of some of the businesses I've been involved with recently, we found it a lot easier if you're trying to take market share rather than create market share, so does that sort of fit into that rubric in some way? How should companies think about that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. If you've checked those first four boxes, then it's a function of how does a customer pay A lot of times. There's two components of this, and then I'll talk about the actual dollars. The first component is you need to make sure it's insanely simple for the customer to buy from you. And it sounds so intuitive and everybody's like, oh, it's absolutely the case. But if your customer is not accustomed to buying SaaS and they only buy ad hoc, then you better figure out how to change your terms of trade to align with ad hoc transactions or you're going to have an uphill battle. It's very, very hard to convert those customers. It's doable, I've done it but it takes years and is a 10x decrease in the amount of money that you'll wind up unlocking over those years.
Speaker 2:Initially, the second part of it is how the customer pays for it. They already have an allocated budget. So let's assume that they're on a normal calendar budget. Their budget starts in January, ends on December 31st. On a calendar year, they might have, let's say, a million dollars set aside, of which a portion is for software and another portion for services or whatever right. However, their distribution is and they have allocated that budget because of the way that they've been paying for things to solve their problems, to get their work done, in the past. If you're a new offering and you come in, you're like gosh, we need a new dollar, meaning that they don't have a budget line item that you're immediately addressing, so you're adding it to the budget. It's very, very hard for them to go back to budget stakeholders and say, listen, I know I said a million, but I need a million one. Or I need a million two in order to pay for this new fancy thing that's going to have some tradeable value to my business. I can get something better, faster, cheaper, whatever you have. It's much easier if you're able to take that $100,000 to that $200,000 that they're spitting with an existing provider or an existing software solution and remove that, that incumbent.
Speaker 2:And I'm going to give you a specific case study here from a SAS perspective. So Decipher, which is a survey platform, my nemesis back in the day was Confirmum, so, and another company called Dimensions, which nobody can remember, but anyway. So those are the. Those were the. That was the three-legged stool. If you're a professional market researcher, you're probably using one of those three. Qualtrics really wasn't in the mix in those days and so what wound up happening is a company like Confirmum. They would lock a customer in to a 12 or 24 month contract right On. This is a per complete basis, so they might do something like talk to a. They would sell something like to eBay. Ebay would have a $100,000 annual contract for the software and then eBay would pay them another $500,000 for completes on top of that. Okay, but the $500,000 would be on a per project basis as opposed to built into the SAS $100,000 contract. That makes sense so far.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, that was it. Absolutely Okay, great and so, and so you've got. You've got this like framework that eBay is already accustomed to. So what I did with Decipher what I is, I would I could go in and say, listen, I want to, I'm going to compete with for that same $600,000. And I can do a better, faster, cheaper job. Instead of you paying $100,000, I'm only going to charge you $50,000 for the software I already lose, because now they've got $150,000 that they've got to assign for this single budget line item and they can't justify it to stakeholders because it means that you know they lose credibility because stakeholders are like why in the hell are you shifting?
Speaker 2:You should have had that decision much longer, and so it would protract the contract, the negotiations, until that the the confirm it license was was up for a new level, right. So what I did was I said, listen, I'm going to give you my platform for free. Let's say that they had signed up for a million completes for a confirm it, whatever the number is, I'd say I'm going to give you a free license. I still signed you to sign contract up to. That matches, dollar for dollar, what you're getting out of the confirm license Now if you spend more, if you use more than you're going to pay for it, but you're not, you're going to be cost neutral as long as you stay inside of your contract parameters. And I want, but I want to be able to bid on that ad hoc work that was $500,000. Okay, so that's an example of how you can have a SAS scenario and compete with an existing dollar and ultimately, when that existing dollar but you've got to have in that example you have to have a long view of the revenue.
Speaker 1:So, jim, just to talk me through that, so would you be offering that alongside Confirmit for free and you're going? You know best supply wins, use whatever you will, but I've taken away the immediate upfront switching cost. Is that the yeah you're addressing?
Speaker 2:the switching. There's a nuanced difference here. One is let's say that there was six months left on the Confirmit license. I'm going to sign up for 12 months plus six months, so in that case it's an 18 month contract for the customer. Okay. So it isn't the case that best. I've already proven that I'm the best at that point and they're an error believer, so that we've crossed that hurdle. The second part there is and this is an important distinction is oftentimes your contract is like minimum usage, meaning that there's a lot of upside opportunity inside of that existing contract on day one. So I'm framing the contract, so I'm capturing the additive utilization that's above their contract norm.
Speaker 1:Gotcha, gotcha, I see. So, jim, I warned you I might throw all the planned questions totally out of the window, and this is great because there's so much stuff I want to ask you. It does, I think, interrelate into one of the questions about what an Earth does a chief revenue officer do? What does a CRO do, and how is that different from ahead of sales?
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, and to your point, the nuances are specific to the organization and, to that end, titles are often cultural in nature, inside of my observation, inside of organizations. So you might have organizations that are very C-suite heavy, that are $20 million under, which is kind of silly in some ways, because you think chief executives are like a 50 or a 100 million or half a billion dollar business. Right, the box bought me. This framework, which is where I serve right now, is CRO. There's a chief product officer, a CTO, chief customer success manager, and so in order to play in that playground at a peer level, you have to have a C title, and so the difference between CRO at box bought me and a vice president of sales or head of revenue or whatever in another company is none in terms of the actual job function itself.
Speaker 2:Now I will say that there has been a unification of marketing and sales inside of the business, meaning that instead of you having a chief marketing officer and a chief revenue officer those sometimes can be separate job functions this organization is opted to combine them into one job function. So I oversee all of marketing and all of sales, and the benefit of that, of course, is that you have more of a focus on attribution focused efforts that drive outcomes, as opposed to more branding initiatives or more abstract frameworks, which have their place. But if you're living and dying on a quarterly basis and on an annual basis, you're thinking a lot about, like, if I put a dollar in, how am I getting $3 out?
Speaker 1:And Jim, I've heard other people describe in the past the idea that marketing and sales are really the same thing, but that marketing is used as an organization to many and sales is you as an organization to very few in terms of the people who may actually buy your products, your service. Would you agree with that?
Speaker 2:I mean I would say categorically marketing is a company's performance over time and how relevant it is as the brand of choice for whatever you're offering. And then sales I mean these are quota-bearing individuals, meaning that they are definitely in the trenches, building relationship with customers, doing the gap analysis, understanding where the opportunities are and continuing that flywheel of connecting with customers in a way that helps customers In basic terms.
Speaker 1:What does Foxpot need do and why did you join from Hub UX?
Speaker 2:I mean. So the story of Hub UX was a four-year startup. Eric Santos and myself he had worked with me at Decipher. He had also he had left and started another platform in the B2B space software platform and then that sold and he was like for his next gig. So it just coincidentally worked out well. The impetus for Hub UX was in 2018, I was doing a podcast interview on Happy Marker Research podcast with Australia Lopez-Barre.
Speaker 2:At the time she was the head of insights for the serial partnership which is, I believe, general Mills and Nestle. It's a massive organization that you've never heard of. They sell Cheerios to 136 countries that kind of thing, anyway and she was telling me the story about how their CEO had institutionalized qualitative research. The CEO, along with all key executives that wanted to keep their jobs. Every quarter they would visit customers and observe them eating breakfast, observe them consuming the products that they were selling and these are real humans connecting with real humans.
Speaker 2:And it took a customer from the boardroom, which is represented in a pie chart, and that CEO would have this funny saying nobody has 2.3 kids. And then it would reduce that conversation to a really or that reduced that pie chart to actually a relationship on a one-to-one basis and humanize that customer in a way that really helped them make solid business decisions. The biggest problem that Australia had at that point in time was the recruiting coordination for those onsite interviews. It was difficult. I mean you're talking 136 countries things there and these are high risk because you've got the freaking CEO, you've got the head of sales. If you've done a bad job screening and they've flown, that's not good, I hear you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's a bad outcome. And so I thought to myself that should be a problem. Why is that hard? It's just logistics and the technology and such, where we should be able to create a solution for that. So that was the impetus.
Speaker 2:Again, is there pain? Yes, there was pain. It was a lot of risk for the serial partnership Recruiting people, scheduling people, making sure that they were who they said there were all those kinds of things. So, yeah, pain. And did they recognize their pain? And she's the one voicing it to me. So of course she did, really willing to pay for it. Actually they were.
Speaker 2:I won't discuss, I think she did on the podcast, but I can't remember specifically. But I mean it was a very large number that they were dollars that they were putting against trying to solve this problem on an annual basis. And would they buy it for me? That was the outstanding question. Why didn't have anything to sell at this point in time? So, because it was in the inception. So that was really the impetus for saying hey, I think there's a market opportunity of POPIWACS. So we built the platform.
Speaker 2:It took us about a year to get it up and running and started scaling it, one of the challenges that we hit with COVID was that corporate budgets froze and their appetite for adding new suppliers or products was quite literally zero. It's very hard to sell into these organizations, and so that's when, at the time, dave Carruthers who's no longer with the business, but he was the CEO of VoxPotme and I started some conversations, early stage conversations about what does the business look like if it's combined. Voxpotme, at that point in time, solely focused on asynchronous or video surveys. These like five to eight question surveys that were video based, and they had the machine learning and AI in place to analyze that data. So in October of 2022, they we announced the acquisition of HUBUX. We supported the synchronous work, they support the asynchronous work and they have a platform that allows us to analyze all the data in a single location, solving a really big problem.
Speaker 2:And so I say the overwrapping thesis for me is that I believe that qualitative research is going to grow much faster than quantitative research over the next 10 years, and the reason I believe that is at the end of the day, a survey is just trying to facilitate a conversation at scale, but nobody speaks in Likert scales, nobody speaks like in pick lists, and so the ability to be able to analyze a thousand people's points of view, have a conversation with a thousand people via in a qualitative framework, is very, very intriguing, very powerful, because it allows you to really uncover the true connect with humans in a human way, which surveys, frankly, just don't do. And that, for me, is the big vision of what VoxPotme is bringing to the market from a market research benefit perspective.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that is really interesting. I guess it speaks to this notion, the idea that traditional quantum quoll has all become about the why, because the what is now available in all sorts of other data, which isn't to say, by the way, that I think that Surbe is dead, and I noticed that you didn't say that it's not going to go away. It still has no it's going to grow.
Speaker 2:It's going to keep growing. But I will say that, like you know, roe Herberhol sees the head of insights for LinkedIn. I have had a good relationship with him. A couple of years ago he stopped doing a V testing on in surveys and he literally just has something to do with himself and he has one of his team members who will launch a study or a, you know, launch an ad campaign on Facebook and he'll see which ad wins. Right, they saw clicks and he has his answer to the question. That whole process might just take hours and has almost no cost to it. Right, all, quite literally, dollars. And so you know, there, there we are seeing disruption in the survey space, but by no means are we, you know, going away the dinosaurs surveyed.
Speaker 2:I believe surveys are going to continue to grow, granted an nominal rate, and but I do think that the green field for us and to your point, like everybody's, asking why I just did the onboarding for Google's generative AI training, developer training, and in the onboarding, I believe it was the CPO, I'm in the CTO, whatever you know whoever it was. But a big deal said, it's never been more important for companies to be able to understand the customers why, and and it's because it's about building human stories, connecting with, with real people, and that's and, and and I think that's what's so interesting. Interesting about generative AI. Thinking about, like your utilization of chat GBT. Yesterday I did some close loss analysis on box bot me's on my pipeline and so I I you know entered in all the reasons.
Speaker 2:That rep said that we lost an opportunity, whatever number it was, and I said please do, please summarize you know this, this data in a in five categories. And it did. And then it provided you know percentages and things like that. And so you know there's you're able to create and you're able to interact with unstructured data and then have very meaningful, actionable outcomes from that. For the first time, like this never happened right for us before, and the biggest point of waste, by the way, in market research is still open-ended, unstructured text. So like there's such a rich opportunity for us to be able to leverage this using generative AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah actually that again is a really good point, I think, in that, as you say, surveys have been, I think, inhibited by quite a rigid structure. You know, the best way of getting information out of people is usually to have a conversation, and it tends to be fluid, you know, in the way in which this conversation is. But I suppose there has been that inhibiting factor where, by, you know, doing hundreds of well, you wouldn't do hundreds of focus groups that way. I've just proven the point. You might do tens of focus groups if it's a big kind of project, and part of that, I guess, just has been the time to process it and yeah, and all that can be done relatively easily now.
Speaker 2:I just did a project for Microsoft. We did an equals 600. Okay, this was a video survey 300 in Brazil and 300 with North America North America and so this was I can't remember the exact number it was, I believe, eight video questions, along with some other diagnostic questions, survey, traditional survey questions, and what we were able to get out of it wasn't just answers to their questions, but we're able to uncover hidden gems around things like brand love and key moments. You know, things that you would just never be able to pull out of quantitative data quantitative data, excuse me, but you would hope to get from qualitative data. But you're able to get that qualitative insight at scale.
Speaker 2:And Steve Jobs has this quote, which I'm sure I'm going to botch, but it goes something like the most dangerous person in the room is the one who can tell a good story, and his intent there is really to illustrate how, if you can connect to your audience through story, you're going to have something that is then repeatable by your audience. And so now you have this like story is leverageable in an organization, whereas pie charts just aren't. If you can communicate something that resonates through the eyes of the consumer, it's like your stakeholders are being like oh my gosh, there is that human truth and that'll help them connect with the data and then actually create change.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, totally, totally agreed, and actually quite a few of the interviewees on this podcast have made similar points from different angles.
Speaker 2:So now you're we're totally off into, in my opinion, the most important topic that researchers can take away from today's conversation, and that it is about the data, your consumer, your, the people that are the executives that are taking your information and making decisions. What they're really looking for is the one thing that they can take away from it and then apply to the business, like the action that goes against it. We've talked about insights to action at Nauseum right over the last 20 years. This is obviously very important. That's not lost on people, but what is lost on people is the lever, and the lever of change is the degree of the store, the quality of the story that you tell, and that story this is the part everybody hates. That story needs to be repeatable. If it isn't repeatable, you've done a bad job. If, a day later, somebody intercepts one of your audience members at the water cooler the virtual water cooler is that person, your audience member, going to be able to retell the point of view that you had?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I very much agree. I mean all those years of doing movie research. I think it's a very good example of that in that you can conceptually have an idea in a film. Studio may have three or four ideas about how they want to market a movie, but until you go through the process of trying it out and winnowing it down and testing out exactly those types of things, can people tell me what this movie is about and why I'd go and see it? None of it really counts. You can have a very nuanced picture that again.
Speaker 1:People, just as you say, they struggle to repeat.
Speaker 2:And exactly 35% of males think X. That isn't telling a story that is repeatable. I did a study last in this past April with BET. This is public knowledge.
Speaker 2:One of their major advertisers is a CPG at whose name I can't disclose, but in that CPG they had us do 50 ethnographies, and so part of the ethnography was understanding how people store their or decide to purchase and ultimately store their cleaning supplies. And so in the ethnography we actually had them go show us where they store their cleaning supplies, and the interesting part of that was the person's telling you about their purchase behaviors and then they flip their camera and now you're walking around their house with them and then you go to where they're storing their cleaning supplies. Like the space between the cleaning supplies and the house that you're exposed to is what was super interesting about the key findings, and that's the part of the story that oftentimes we lose in quantum research. We get right to the data but we don't have the context for further points of view. We lose that and we try to address it with more questions, but you and I both know that just doesn't work. So, yeah, that's where I think next 10 years quality of research is going to be very interesting.
Speaker 1:Now, jim, if it's OK, I wanted to jump off the market research space and just touch on some of the charitable endeavors that you're involved in. There are a host of them, and be good to just touch on some of those, maybe kind of call them out so people can support them and understand what you and they are looking to achieve.
Speaker 2:I'm a big believer in investing in where you live. We need diversity inside of market research, we need it everywhere categorically, and there is this there is oftentimes the case that lower income, if you're successful, you wind up moving to a coastal city, and the problem is that you stop investing subsequently into the communities that you're part of, and so a big part of my ethos, of my wife's as well, is make a different. You know, grow where you're planted, make a difference where you live, and for me, the way that I try to accomplish that which is a little bit self serving, by the way is by job creation. And then the second way is investment with time and energy with the Boys and Girls Club of America.
Speaker 2:That's another one. That's. That's a really near and dear to me. There's there in my community, eight out of 10, which is how the statistic is recited of children that are under the age of 18 are disadvantaged and half of them have empty refrigerators. So when you think about, when you think about, like, our opportunities to help solve this, some generational issues, it is, in my opinion, a lot about, like job creation, and then also mentorship and connection, and so for me, you know where my time is spent outside of work and family and fun also, by the way you know, is set to try to solve some of these bigger issues.
Speaker 1:So, Jamie, whereabouts do you live in the US? I should probably know this already.
Speaker 2:Yeah, place called Central Valley of California, fresno, california. It's right in the heart largely agricultural nature. So we have a lot of first and second generation Americans here. Just given the nature of farm labor, by default I happen to be fourth generation from this area. Yeah, my opening slide if you ever, if I've never done this for market research, maybe I will someday, because I just don't think anybody cares. But my first slide when I saw I also teach at a local. I teach MBA courses at Fresno State and my opening slide on the get to know you is a picture of me at 11 years old picking grapes. Because that was just, that was literally how I was. It was grapes to raisins. That's how is you know? We're making money for the family. My sister and I both did this growing up, so you know very much.
Speaker 1:a blue collar background Credit to you in, you know, giving back your time and commercial support to the local area. It's just I had, maybe, this misguided perception that lots of people do. You know California's, whatever it is, if it was fancy independent country, seventh biggest economy and all that type of thing. It just made me very naive of me. I had no idea around the extent of the poverty on a wide scale nature within.
Speaker 2:California. Yeah, absolutely yeah. Fresno Central Valley is the or. Fresno is the sixth largest city in California and it's also one of the most disadvantaged zip codes, or DMAs, in America. So it's a it's a interesting dichotomy tale of two cities living here.
Speaker 1:I just know a little bit about our sec education, which also involved with so what's going on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, parts of education. This is an ed tech company, educational technology company. It's a. It's in the startup phase and I've never seen a company grow as fast as this company has grown it is. It is scratching.
Speaker 2:So you know one of the challenges in if you're a teacher and my wife, by the way, in full disclosure, there's a fifth grade uh school teacher One of the challenges is crafting educational plans for uh students that map to what's called the standards. So what is the, the uh, the competency or the you know, what you know level of math does a student need to have with? You know, reading, writing, all the things right, and so, um, uh, that's very challenging at a classroom level because you have to deal with it at individual level. So if you have, let's say, 35 children in a classroom, um, and you can imagine the disparity between some over performers and under performers. Now, as a kid, you're kind of immune to all this because you're so, like, myopic and focused on yourself. But as a teacher, this is a big problem because you have kids that some kids that you know can't read like.
Speaker 2:That's literally a thing that she has to deal with, which is which is unfortunate, and fifth grade, in the first of graders, and so, and you also can't cater to the least common denominator, because nobody's going to, nobody's going to ask that. And so one of the things that Parsiq does that that I'm super in tune with is it creates, it understands the um, uh requirements that are set up by the uh California School board and um at the, at the, at the classroom level, and then it assesses the student based on their test scores and then it creates a customized plan for each one of each student that can, that the teacher can then employ to help that uh, help that student understand or to gain traction and ultimately get up to uh to their standard, to the school board standards.
Speaker 1:And then, how is the plan?
Speaker 2:delivered. Yeah, yeah, that's. That's a. That's probably more of a question from, like my practitioner, like my wife, but but from what she tells me every night, the way that it's all, the way that it's ultimately because, to your point, like you're in a finite, you're in a like a tight geographic, a tight classroom, and you're not sitting there one on one with the students. Thankfully, technology now, I mean COVID was catastrophic, but one of the things that came out of it was technology adoption and proficiency, both with students but, more importantly, with teachers. So there is work that is done on Chrome, on Chromebooks. The benefit is it does help because the teacher has doesn't have the burden of having to come up with 35 individualized plans. They're able to start with an existing template.
Speaker 1:I'm conscious of time so I might start to wrap up, but do a few final questions and I'm going to throw one at one at you that you actually just mentioned. What do you do for fun? I mean, you're busy, you're creating successful companies, you're helping the local economy, so you must have some fun sometimes.
Speaker 2:I have a lot. I have probably more fun than I should. I have two things that I love to do. One is I still play this video game called Eve online. I don't play it a lot. I play it for maybe 30 minutes a day Sometimes. You know, if I get online with my friends, I have some friends we connect through Discord that play it as well. You know we might be out for like three or four hours if my wife will allow me to, a couple of times a month. But so yeah, so that's like thing one. And thing two is is woodworking. I'm still very, I'm very, passionate about woodworking. I hope that my last business that I do is a carpentry business for custom furniture. That's my. You know, 10 years from now. I got a lot of skill I need to catch up on, but yeah, that's my, that's my one game.
Speaker 1:So do you have kids? I'm not sure if you have five. You have five kids, that's all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 20. All this is 21. The youngest is six, and so, like I was just talking, my wife and I started our day every morning talking about the three things that were thankful for, and my this morning thing, which is November 14, 2023, I told her one of the things I was thankful for is the bedtime ritual. We watch a. I watch, sit down on the couch with the kids. They climb on top of me. I watch we watch a bluey, which is this fantastic cartoon, and then they both jump on my back and I carry them to their bedroom and my wife is a monster chasing us, which ultimately winds up with me getting elbowed in the eye or some like yeah, I think, but it's like those. Those are the moments as that that I think all of us live for and need in life. And so you know, if we have those things then, and basic necessities, of course, then everything's going to be okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that sounds fantastic. I'm assuming these are the two youngest kids. By the way, yeah, 21 year old I'd be on his shoulder.
Speaker 2:He's six one. He's a big dude.
Speaker 1:And actually on that subject. So what personal traits of yours would you like your children to inherit? But perhaps even more pertinently, are there any they should avoid?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not sure I'm be willing to share the avoid, but I will share the the I mean. Well, yeah, it is funny, isn't it? Our greatest strengths are oftentimes our greatest weaknesses. I'm a grinder. I love what I do, I work, of course, but I also am very passionate about my work, literally.
Speaker 2:I'm excited about getting back to some Excel sheets that are going to be working on after this call, and so I think the things that I would hope that my children would adopt is this ability to be able to really focus for long periods of time on the same thing, and then also the discipline of showing up despite how you feel, despite how you're. You know, and I've taken that definitely to an extreme Right in 2021, I wound up with an infection in my in my face and I had really bad swelling, but I was scheduled to speak at a conference in Washington DC, and so I, instead of like not doing it, I literally put on a cold, open mask so you couldn't see this like really disturbing swelling that was on my in my face, and I went into the into the event. So that's an example of. I think maybe I take it a little too far. I'm honoring those commitments, but um it's, it's, it's serving well enough.
Speaker 1:So I will take that. As you know, sometimes you can take it too far, as maybe the trait where you would Exactly suggest you know a little bit of moderation, self-awareness from that.
Speaker 2:Right yeah, which I definitely lack. I'm not going to let go of the bone.
Speaker 1:Jamin, thank you so much. As always, it's a pleasure talking to you and incredibly enlightening and hopefully I can hopefully I can continue to pick your brain on all sorts of subjects.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for the opportunity, henry. I really appreciate it. Now I don't know about you, but I learned a ton from Jamin, Amongst many others.
Speaker 1:I think he has a really key point around the importance of human data and how we make decisions in the future. That's also a key theme of the next interview in our series with one of the most senior and accomplished women in the insight sector Tina Wilson Group General Manager of Nielsen's portfolio of analytics businesses. Thank you once more to Insights Platforms for their support, to brighter for sponsoring this episode and to you for listening. See you next time.
